dave's blog of art and programming

Build a World

A self building text adventure game which starts off with an empty world:

You build new places with “build my house n” (which means build my house to the north) then you can go there “n” and give it a description “describe a blue house with red doors”. You can also make objects with eg “make cheese” and take it (when it will be added to your inventory), move around and drop it elsewhere.

If you type “dot” you get a text description of the world which can be read by graphviz. Here is part of my mental model of Helsinki:

As it says in the embedded page, it’s very much inspired by Craig Latta’s quoth musical livecoding system, which uses an interface like this to create musical entities you can interact with.

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7 responses to “Build a World”

  1. yaxu Avatar
    yaxu

    Lovely! Reminds me of the builder MUDs I used to spend too much time fiddling with in my youth, UGLYMUG and TCZ, which still seem to be going… It was live coding in a multi-user chat system basically.

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  2. aymeric Avatar
    aymeric

    haha! nice 🙂

    You might want to add quotes for the names used in the digraph though, to not have “my house” turning into just “my” when you call dot.

    Reply
  3. Kassen Avatar
    Kassen

    Ah,yes, Quoth! I still want that, I wonder what equinox and solstice he meant back then. Does anyone know where he lives, so we can protest/beg outside his house?

    I like this too, but it doesn’t make noise (yet?) so it doesn’t quite pacify my urge to play with Qouth. Oh, and I couldn’t get “look” to work.

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  4. dave Avatar
    dave

    yaxu – thanks, I never experienced MUDs but I can check them out now!
    aymeric – fixed!
    kassen – no music yet, but it’s not entirely out of the question. In terms of a multi user livecoding system, I could imagine building a collaborative modular synth this way, eg. with unit generators as place names “build mooglpf e”. hmmm.

    Reply
  5. Kassen Avatar
    Kassen

    That would be cool, especially with something like Quoth’s ability to learn verbs (at least that was there as a idea). In a multi-player context we could use eachother’s verbs; that might be a very new take on the idea of code as a expressive medium and a new sort of interactivity.

    Reply
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